Interview: Lindwe Mazibuko, the new black face of South Africa's 'white' party

Lindwe Mazibuko is the first black woman to pose a serious challenge to the
ANC. But can she convince the electorate, asks Aislinn Laing.

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Lindiwe Mazibuko, 31, is the new parliamentary leader of the Democratic Alliance party

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Julius Malema, the recently suspended president of the ANC's Youth League, could be a rival to Miss Mazibuko in the futurePhoto: AFP/GETTY

Aislinn Laing in Cape Town

6:56PM GMT 12 Nov 2011

Eighteen years ago, Lindiwe Mazibuko would not have been allowed near South Africa's imposing parliamentary complex unless she was making tea or cleaning the floors.

Today, she sits behind a wide, paper-strewn desk in a wood-panelled office, juggling two phones that won't stop ringing while summoning her white secretary for the tea.

The obvious assumption is that Miss Mazibuko is one of a powerful group of women in top jobs within the African National Congress, the party that called time on apartheid when Nelson Mandela was voted into office in 1994.

Instead, she is the first black woman to lead a serious challenge to the ANC's 17-year grasp on power, the first black woman to offer her country a viable alternative to one-party rule.

Recently elected the parliamentary leader of South Africa's chief opposition party, the Democratic Alliance, she believes it could take power in as little as eight years for it to win national power.

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"I live in a young country that needs a political alternative to the ANC," Miss Mazibuko told The Sunday Telegraph last week. She speaks English with an accent honed by her one experience of serving tea for a living - a gap year spent working at a branch of Starbucks in London's Notting Hill. "I'm in a political party that presents that alternative, and crucially, I stood up and said 'Let me have a go'.

"I believe that as we become a more mature democracy, we will start to fight issues on the basis of policy and so having a leader who adds to the diversity of the party will matter less and less."

The DA was previously dismissed as the domain of white liberals, but is now seen by some as South Africa's most racially diverse party. It has increased its total share of the vote from under two per cent at the birth of democracy to 24 per cent at the 2009 elections - with the support of almost all of the country's white population, and the vast majority of ethnic Indians and those of mixed race.

With only six per cent of black voters, it still has some way to go before it can challenge the ANC's massive majority, and many voters will never desert those who fought for their freedom from white rule.

But others are losing patience with the slow pace of change, which has seen those same freedom fighters and their friends grow rich on the spoils of power while the rest remain poor.

Widespread corruption, a ramshackle education system and the failure of the "Black Economic Empowerment" policy - now dubbed "Zuma Economic Empowerment" for the benefits it has heaped on the president's men - have ensured South Africa remains one of the most unequal qualities in the world. Almost 40 per cent of its population now languishes below the breadline, deprived of basic services and jobs, while others enjoy massive and new-found wealth.

Today, ANC politicians' minds - and newspaper headlines - are frequently focused not on how to create jobs and educate the young but on the battle between the president, Jacob Zuma, and his loudmouth young pretender Julius Malema, who was suspended last week from the party for five years for misconduct. Mr Malema says he too has lost patience with Mr Zuma's style of governance, and has called for voters to back Zimbabwe-style seizures of white land and nationalisation of foreign-owned mines to solve South Africa's ills.

The DA, though, says voters should opt for a different, but equally radical solution: kicking South Africa's liberation heroes out of power and let another party have a go.

"We are trying to win over people who don't believe in revenge, who don't believe in black domination replacing white domination, who want a shared future but can't yet swim over to the DA's side because they're unsure about whether or not they can trust us," Miss Mazibuko said.

Key to gaining that trust is convincing the electorate that they will not, as the ANC has suggested, "bring back apartheid". The DA has its roots in the fight against the colour bar, and counts among its early leaders the late Helen Suzman, a veteran Jewish anti-apartheid activist who was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.

But a post-1994 merger with the chastened apartheid rulers, the New National Party, proved disastrous for the DA's credentials and is still remembered by many even though the two parties subsequently went their separate ways - the New National Party merging instead with the ANC. Until recently, the DA's liberal values and support for Mr Mandela's equality-led constitution were not enough for it to shed its image as a mainly white party - not helped by the fact that most of its senior leaders were themselves white.

More recently, however, black figures have begun to come to the fore, including two provincial leaders and, in parliament, the shadow foreign minister.

Enter Miss Mazibuko, an articulate, sharp-tongued and ambitious black woman who grew up in a Zulu township.

Educated at a private school, she is the daughter of a banker and possessor of a cut-glass English accent, honed by a gap year working as a Starbucks manager in London's Notting Hill.

She is seen by the party's strategists as a way to bridge the race gap, rather than someone who will purely court the black vote.

As one tweeter observed on the day of her election: "Lindiwe Mazibuko: Change you can believe in, with an accent you can understand."

For Helen Zille, the DA's overall party leader, Miss Mazibuko's colour simply gives her a political advantage: "She can take the ANC on without the accusations of being racist," she said.

Miss Mazibuko is strangely unsentimental about her promotion, just two and a half years into her political career.

"I'm a product of the times in which I live," she said in her new office, where a cartoon is pinned to the wall depicting a cackling Miss Mazibuko painting a black stripe into the DA's blue, green, red, white and yellow logo.

"There's a huge opening for us amongst a wide range of voters, and we think 2019 will be our first opportunity. It can't just be about cynical electoral success, we actually have to offer solutions for problems that have been left by apartheid and bad government under the ANC."

Inevitably, Miss Mazibuko's propulsion into the limelight has prompted accusations of favouritism.

She says she loses no sleep over the criticism, having developed a thick skin to cope with being bullied when younger because of her parents' relative wealth.

"Our neighbours around us were very poor and there were all kinds of accusations about where we had got our money from, whether we were apartheid spies," she said.

"The neighbours kids used to say: 'You think you're better than us, you think you're white' and we used to go crying to my dad and he would say: 'But you are better than them. I don't understand the problem.'"

She lets out a rare peal of laughter, adding: "From the start, my parents raised me not to try and follow the crowd."

That upbringing means she is also well-placed to deal with the taunts of Julius Malema and Co that she is a "tea girl to the madam" and a "coconut" - black on the outside and white on the inside.

"Julius Malema doesn't know me from a bar of soap and whatever he says about me, it's all about his own misogyny and his own issues," she says.

Mr Malema, the president of the ANC's Youth League, was last week suspended from the ruling party for five years for indiscipline and challenging President Zuma.

But there's little doubt that the headstrong young politician will continue to play a key role in South Africa's political future, making him possibly Miss Mazibuko most direct rival in future years.

Both he and Miss Mazibuko speak to the estimated 51 per cent of South Africans who are aged 24 and under, many of them know as "born-frees" for their lack of historical, and political, baggage.

In a country where rallies are dominated by song and dance, and where Malema scores points by shouting the loudest, it remains to be seen whether the DA will land punches through reasoned debate and complex solutions.

"He gets an easy ride because he sells newspapers and raises television ratings," Mazibuko said.

"But I don't buy into this notion that young, poor, disadvantaged South Africans are just angry and want to tear the country apart. There are equally plenty who want to find a solution and contribute to it."

The DA shares the ANC's stated desire to cut red tape, improve infrastructure and invest in skills training for younger South Africans. But it takes a more conservative view of the power of the state, which it believes should be limited, and encourages South Africans to take more responsibility for solving their own problems.

Julius Malema's claim to be a champion of the poor has been tarnished somewhat by his weakness for natty suits, Sandton mansions, Breitling watches and club nights on Cristal and Black Label whisky.

By contrast, the DA leader buys her clothes at the South African equivalent of M&S, wears little jewellery and prefers a night watching Come Dine with Me and eating leftovers to clubbing. "I don't actually own a watch," she adds.

Tellingly, Miss Mazibuko reserves little venom for President Zuma, who is increasingly likely to face a leadership challenge at next December's electoral conference.

The party of Nelson Mandela, she believes, can no longer lay a claim to him, having squandered his principles. "Nelson Mandela was a leader," she said. "He had tea with (apartheid architect) Hendrik Verwoed's wife and everyone was shocked but he was trying to say something about reconciliation which we weren't ready for but which he made us.

"Zuma is incapable of making a decision, striking out and saying 'follow me'. The ANC is more interested in political expediency than in principle and making things happen for the benefit of this country."

She believes the ANC will increasingly have to take the on the DA, having hitherto more or less ignored it.

"All that stuff about the madam and the servants, it was all perfectly pitched at trying to chip away at people's increasing levels of trust in the DA, by hitting at their scar tissue and making them feel the pain of apartheid again," she said.

"The dirty tricks are a sign of our success and of their desperation. Which means we're clearly we're doing something right."